The usual formula for Helsinki’s South Harbour

We are decamped to where birdsong dominates. Here the Baltic Sea still looks lovely even as the battle against using it as a dump falters.

Meanwhile, like every Midsummer, Helsinki has apparently been given over to the tourists and the seagulls.

Looking at the results of the City Planning Department’s South Harbour Ideas Competition, it’s clear that the summer and the tourist (not least the Baltic Sea cruise passengers) are very much to the fore in the city managers’ thoughts.

For me the images highlight the gulf between my dreams and the dreams (?) of those who manage the city. Once again they have followed the usual and deadening formula: rhetoric of vitality + Computer Aided Design = winning entry.

I love the South Harbour, iconic view and image, and still as real as the pain in my toe. What, I wonder, do the tourists make of the market square and its surroundings?

If they are arriving cruise passengers, what do they perceive? An interesting city scape? Or other cruise ships six times the size of the largest edifices anchored on dry land?

JHJ had the pleasure of arriving by ship just last week. Beautiful. Interesting. People doing stuff.

The Harbour, at least from a distance, looked like a hive of real activity.

It made me think of a recent essay by that unbelievably prolific anthropologist David Graeber, called ‘Of flying cars and the declining rate of profit’. What, the essay ponders, are we all so busy with?

In Helsinki it wasn’t so long ago that office workers, university people and perhaps some local housewives (and at least one -husband I know of) frequented the market, the market-hall and the area around, for shopping, meeting, taking boats to islands and passing through on their way to somewhere else. And a good few people used to work here.

Some still do.

Not that there is that much work for dockworkers. Plenty of work for cleaners though. A startling proportion of those we saw appear to be darker skinned than most Finns.

Back to Graeber. I understood him to be saying that capitalism + computing has managed to reduce us all to administrators of our own and others’ lives. Creative doing is as hard as creativity-talk is necessary. All creatives do is try to sell.

The Planning Department and the City are selling Helsinki. As JHJ noted in an earlier post, this involves lots of image-making. And endless power-points accompanied by linguistic novelties like the “future dogmatic” or “future positive”, supposed to make us gaze misty-eyed into the lovely future and forget about the mess we continue to produce (my thoughts returning once more to the poor old Baltic).

The South Harbour Jury Report (available on this page), though not quite completely information-free, is pretty much in this vein of vacuous rhetoric. (But was the only thing they were looking for a way to get a decent cycling facility to get through the bottleneck of the market?)

P.S. Only one of the 4 winning entries, Meren Syleily, mentions work that’s not related to entertainment. Shame the prose is so complicated.

Keeping working
Just as importantly none of the proposals run counter to the essential requirements of the shipping terminals, ensuring that the activities of the port can continue unaffected, unconstrained by the imposition either of new obligations or overlapping functions.

TINA or “Entrepreneurial urban governance”

Finland’s blogosphere is welling up with the energies of those again alerted to the possible arrival of an “ice-cube shaped hotel” (whether in careful appreciation or in polite disgust) in a previously taken-for-granted and hardly noticed part of Helsinki’s central waterfront. The whole area was the gateway to the country for quite some time before air travel was invented, and it is still arguably this physical approach into Helsinki that attracts a good number of returning cruise-passengers. The skyline is worth just staring at as well as photographing. On top of the purely visual, the arrival offers multisensory experiences and, unless you are totally disconnected, it’s quite easy to understand the place you’re arriving to as a living, breathing form of everyday rhythmic urban life. Besides seeing and understanding the street down towards Kaivopuisto that’s still visible (plans are to hide it underground) and the routes towards the North Harbour and Katajanokka itself, you can quickly tell whether the market is busy, quiet, strewn with debris or freshly swept, depending on the time of day or year. And you can probably tell that not just image managers but actual producers of life are at work, at least from time to time.

None of this, however, is recognised by the “entrepreneurial urban government” of which we wrote yesterday. What that means is that the commercial, which has ALWAYS been central to city life, has all but pushed aside all else, not in the city itself but in the minds of its decision makers (or governors if you like). To planners and similar types, urban government is the portfolio of activities that make the metabolism or the ecology of the city operate without too much pathology (it helps avoid piles of waste or urban riots and puts in roads, hospitals etc) is now really pretty unfashionable and certainly not high on agendas. In its entrepreneurial form it, well, its just consumerism writ urban scale.

Architecture is high on this agenda, it’s commercial, consumerist, the star of today’s cities. Alas, it’s often quite durable and consequential too. (Was it Le Corbusier who posed the question: Revolution or architecture? Wonder if this is what he had in mind…)

When, one wonders, will the revolution of the exluded ordinary citizens begin? We ask, because here’s what one self-described Finnish Green politician had to say on his blog last week:

Hotellit ovat myös avoimia tiloja verrattuna esimerkiksi yhtiöiden pääkonttoreihin.

[our translation]  hotels are also open spaces compared to, for instance, corporate headquarters

Quite. Those spaces which have meant that more and more adults across cities everywhere walk around like “key children” whose house keys hang around their necks. Still, I gather that biometrics means the posher corporate HQs now do without, either implanting employees with chips or providing doors that recognise employees fingerprints.

This blogger went on to echo the “official” view that we here at JHJ don’t like, that the plans are indeed part of the same “upgrading” of a supposedly too quiet part of the world. Bringing lots of people with lots of money into this part of the world is another thing that “entrepreneurial urban governance” does, especially if it does it by seeking out private capital with which to build so that it wouldn’t have to encroach on the spending power of the rich by actually taxing them to contribute to public goods.

Entrepreneurial urban governance starts not from the urban plan, as was, but from the plan for the economy (the debt):

Hotellihankkeen katsottiin osaltaan tukevan kaupungin elinkeinopoliittisten tavoitteiden toteutumista ja suunnitteilla olevia
Kauppatorin ympäristön ja Kaupungintalokortteleiden kehittämis- ja elävöittämishankkeita.

or: the hotel project was seen for its part to support the realisation of the city’s economic policy and the planned development and renewal projects around the market and the City Hall area.

This from last week’s agenda of the City Board’s meeting.

I wonder if what we are dealing with is the embryo of something that will put the idea of the civic out of the city of Helsinki for a long time to come. For a hotel is not for the city.

Some headlines and comments suggest that the architectural profession is once again showing its disregard for public sentiment, telling people who prefer the old that they don’t understand, or they’re cowardly or debilitatingly conservative. The profession in Finland is somewhat divided on the topic it seems, but not that much, and not that far from the broader public either. In yesterday’s internet issue of Rakennuslehti the Finnish Association for Architecture is, once again, shown as somewhat upset by the scheme. It quotes an officer as saying there should be more debate, more involvement of the Finnish architecture profession, and more alternatives.

Which kind of brings me to the heart of “entrepreneurial urban governance” which is the slogan TINA=there is no alternative. No alternative, that is, to the individualist, acquisitive, materialist and self-defeating dogmas of thatcherism and reaganism that, for the time being, have yet to be properly exploded. Still, if not in Helsinki’s political classes or even in its media, alternatives are of course being soughgt.